The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications standards associations. The 3GPP defined mobile phone system specifications for telecommunications networks including 3G, 4G, and Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The next generation network for 3GPP is the 5G network. The 5G specifications target high data rates, reduced latency, energy saving, cost reduction, higher system capacity, and increasing numbers of connected devices.
The 3GPP has defined a service-based architecture for its next generation 5G core network. In a service-based architecture, services are provided to software components by application components, typically through a communication protocol over a data communications network. A service can be, e.g., a discrete function that can be accessed remotely and consumed and updated independently of other services in the system. Different services can be used together to provide the functionality of a larger functional system such as a software application. The service-based architecture can integrate distributed and separately-maintained software components.
In order to enable service consumers to communicate with service producers, consumers are expected to discover producers via a discovery service and then directly communicate with the producers. For example, in the 5G core network, services perform these functions using RESTful APIs over HTTP/2. While the approach defined by 3GPP works, it places a lot of the burden on the service consumers and producers to implement networking functionality such as service discovery, load balancing, overload control, circuit breaker, retries, timeouts, and the like.
Accordingly, there exists a need for methods, systems, and computer readable media for providing a service proxy function in a telecommunications network core using a service-based architecture.